Whenever a person “overreacts”—that is, reacts in a way that seems inappropriately exaggerated to the situation at hand, we can be sure that implicit memory is at work. The reaction is not to the irritant in the present but to some buried hurt in the past. Many of us look back puzzled on some emotional explosion and ask ourselves, “What the heck was that about?” It was about implicit memory; we just didn’t realize it at the time.
